Jaguar Upgrade Brings ORNL Closer To Petascale Computing

Date:

May 19, 2008

Source:

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Summary:

Upgrades to Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer have more than doubled its performance, increasing the system's ability to deliver far-reaching advances in climate studies, energy research and a wide range of sciences.

Share:

Total shares:

FULL STORY

Upgrades to Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer have more than doubled its performance, increasing the system's ability to deliver far-reaching advances in climate studies, energy research, and a wide range of sciences.

The Jaguar system, a Cray XT4 located at ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences, now uses more than 31,000 processing cores to deliver up to 263 trillion calculations a second (or 263 teraflops).

"The Department of Energy's Leadership Computing Facility is putting unprecedented computing power in the hands of leading scientists to enable the next breakthroughs in science and technology," said ORNL Director Thom Mason. "This upgrade is an essential step along that path, bringing us ever closer to the era of petascale computing [systems capable of thousands of trillions of calculations per second]."

Jaguar was among the most powerful computing systems within DOE's Office of Science even before the recent upgrade and has delivered extraordinary results across a broad range of computational sciences.

"The leadership capability at Oak Ridge has been delivering real scientific results," said Michael Strayer, associate director for advanced scientific computing research in the DOE Office of Science. "Benoît Roux of the University of Chicago used Jaguar to simulate in unprecedented detail the voltage-gated potassium channel, a membrane protein that responds to spikes of electricity by changing shape to allow potassium ions to enter a cell. This work has the potential to help us understand and control certain forms of cardiovascular and neurological disease."

Climate scientists are calculating the potential consequences of greenhouse gas emissions and the potential benefits of limiting these emissions. Combustion scientists are modeling the most efficient designs for engines that use fossil fuels and biofuels. Fusion researchers are using the system to lead the way toward a clean and plentiful source of electricity. Physicists are exploring the secrets of the universe, illuminating its most elusive mysteries. And materials scientists are searching for the next revolution in technology.

"This is an important advancement," said Thomas Zacharia, ORNL associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences. "Leading researchers need many orders of magnitude more computing power and infrastructure than we can yet provide, and they have shown us how they will use these new resources, whether it be to predict the consequences of climate change at the regional level, design new materials with predetermined properties, discover new chemical catalysts, explore more efficient ways to manufacture biofuels, or simulate all important aspects of new reactor designs."

"The U.S. Department of Energy and its Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been making huge strides in providing more and more simulation capabilities to advance some of the world's most important scientific and engineering research—and invaluable partners with Cray to push the leading edge of supercomputing," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "This upgrade is another big milestone in leadership computing and we, along with many others around the world, are looking forward to learning about the scientific breakthroughs that are borne as a result of this powerful new computing capability."

With its new power, Jaguar will be able to double its contribution to DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, which is revolutionizing key areas of science by facilitating the world's most challenging computer simulations. The NCCS will host 30 INCITE projects in 2008 from universities, private industry, and government research laboratories, contributing more than 140 million processor hours on Jaguar.

July 30, 2015  It is possible to predict the timing and intensity of influenza outbreaks in subtropical climates like Hong Kong where flu seasons can occur at different times and more than once during a year, ... read more

July 30, 2015  A new automated data mining system could lead to a dramatic increase in the detection of potentially illegal online sales of elephant ivory through eBay. Law enforcement agencies and conservationist ... read more

July 28, 2015  Researchers explain how the new paradigm of a digital healthcare system, as it matures, is putting the picture of the doctor-patient relationship in an entirely new frame and not always in a positive ... read more

June 12, 2013  ORNL's Titan supercomputer has completed rigorous acceptance testing to ensure the functionality, performance and stability of the machine, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing ... read more

Nov. 14, 2012  Not only is Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan the world's most powerful supercomputer, it is also one of the most energy-efficient. Titan came in at number three on the Green500 ... read more

Nov. 12, 2012  The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is again home to the most powerful computer in the world, according to the Top500 list, a semiannual ranking of computing systems ... read more

Oct. 29, 2012  The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory has just launched a new era of scientific supercomputing with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 ... read more